


Balance

by rosweldrmr



Series: Balance Series [1]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Canon Divergence, F/M, Universe Alteration
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-20
Updated: 2015-03-20
Packaged: 2018-03-18 18:50:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 20,097
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3580167
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rosweldrmr/pseuds/rosweldrmr
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She should have been graduating from college in a year. She should be a year into a NAS fellowship. She should have been a lot of things. Instead, she is standing in the moonlight in the Nemeton’s clearing. The broken, half-crushed body of Peter Hale is strewn across the gnarled bark of the great stump, almost like a gift being presented. "The Guardian has come," the Dead whisper. Their voices rattle like chains against metal bars. Moaning and keening, restless this waxing Worm Moon.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Balance

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ivorygraves](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ivorygraves/gifts).



> This was written for the [Teen Wolf Rare Pair exchange Round 3](http://twrarepairexchange.tumblr.com/post/99698027052/). I signed up late as a pinch hitter (at Ivy’s urging) and I jokingly said ‘Imagine if I get assigned you’. Well, it happened. That’s right, I’m living the dream~~ This has been a labor of love and I really hope you like it, Ivy. I tried to give you ALL THE THINGS you wanted. You are amazing and wonderful and I love you so much, I wanted to do everything for you. So in addition to this main fic, there will also be [5 drabbles in the same universe](http://archiveofourown.org/series/230973) for your other preferred ships. There are also two graphics and a [soundtrack](https://play.spotify.com/user/rosweldrmr/playlist/3kKFBs9yHtLv0hEACUyHQK) to accompany this. I have to give a huge thank you to [Lisa](happycurtiss.tumblr.com) for being my beta. She was so sweet to edit this monster for me, last minute. Thank you to the Mods of the [TWrarepairexchange](http://twrarepairexchange.tumblr.com). They are so sweet and could not have given me a more motivating giftee. I would also like Ivy to know how hard this has been to keep from you. I couldn’t even tell you I got an assignment because we would talk about it and you would be my beta and I had to hide so much from you these last few weeks. I’m so sorry. I hope this makes up for it.

\--

“Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. ... If we are strong enough in our souls we can rip away the veil and look that naked, terrible beauty right in the face; let God consume us, devour us, unstring our bones. Then spit us out reborn[.](http://montilyei.tumblr.com/post/75821714510)”

\--

There is a story, a legend, whispered in the dark, of a girl who communes with the Dead. They say she’s as beautiful as she is terrifying. Banshee, they quiver, as if to say it would be to invoke her. There are many versions of her story, each more terrible than the last. They say she can kill with a word. They say she was bitten and reborn. Fiercely protective of what’s hers, they say she collects the souls of the Dead. They say her eyes glow white (or gold or emerald or sapphire) when she wails. ‘Don’t mess with her wolves’ they say, ‘or her face is the last thing you will ever see.’ They say she’s Death itself, vengeful and wicked and scorned. They say you can’t kill what’s already dead[.](http://endversefolklore.tumblr.com/post/72735032752/)

\--

_The Guardian has come._

They whisper it, the Dead who keep her company.

Lydia has grown accustom to their whispers. In the years since Allison’s death, she has learned how to control it, her powers, what she is. She’s learned to reach beyond herself, past the veil of death, to graze her thoughts over those who have gone before. She’s learned to Listen, to See, to Know. She’s learned how to tug on the connections of the physical world, to tether the Dead to her own soul. She’s learned to let them in, to hold them in the heart of her.

She dreams of MIT sometimes. When the moon is gone from the sky and the howl of phantom wolves don’t keep her up. When the weather is temperate and spring is in the air she dreams of another life. The one before. Before myths and monsters. Before the Dead could Speak and she could Hear. Before Peter Hale and Scott McCall. Before the world grew darker and deeper and her dreams were so out of reach.

She dreams of being a female pioneer in the field of applied mathematics. She dreams of college, of research papers, of Fields Medals. She dreams of being the first woman recipient. She dreams of Wolf Prizes and P versus NP. Hodges and Yang-Mills and Riemann. Conjectures and hypotheses and proofs that she will never know.

Not anymore.

Today is her 22nd birthday. It’s been five years since she drugged and kidnapped Derek and used him to resurrect Peter. It’s been four years since she buried Allison. It’s been three years since she passed on college and worked her first official case as a consultant with the Beacon Hills Sheriff’s Department. Two years since she started her own Psychic agency. One year since she’s seen Stiles and Scott and Kira.

She should have been graduating from college in a year. She should be a year into a NAS fellowship. She should have been a lot of things. Instead, she is standing in the moonlight in the Nemeton’s clearing. The broken, half-crushed body of Peter Hale is strewn across the gnarled bark of the great stump, almost like a gift being presented.

_The Guardian has come._

The Dead whisper. Their voices rattle like chains against metal bars. Moaning and keening, restless this waxing Worm Moon. She can block them out, or hold them in. A skill she’s developed through the years. A necessity, given what she is. Without it, she would have been lost to madness long ago. Like Meredith. Like her grandmother.

That was the price of what she was, insanity. A byproduct of the power to hear what others could not. Even now, she can feel it. The buzz of insanity starting at the base of her skull. And Lydia knows someday she will be lost to it too. Someday all these voices and ghosts will burn her up from the inside. Make ashes of her heart; dismantle the temple of her mind. The empire of her soul will crumble with the weight of it.

She’s known that almost since the beginning. But tonight she doesn’t shut them out.

She doesn’t mute them, or trap them away inside an unused part of herself. That part that fills to the brim with grief and anger and pain that isn’t her own until she’s so full, so heavy she doesn’t think she can cope with one more voice clamoring for one more thing. That part of herself that she can slam shut like a door in her mind, locking them away. Locking them in.

She could lock them out too. Close off that part of her that acts like an antenna, the way she receives their pleas and their desperate, angry demands.

But she doesn’t do that either.

Not tonight. Tonight, she shuts her eyes and reaches out with that part of her that comes from within and feathers out, past the carefully defined edges of Self and Consciousness. That sense that can exist without a body, without that boundary of flesh and bone. She reaches out and calls them to her.

She calls the disparate, the lonely, the abandoned, the Dead. And they come to her. They swarm into her in droves. A great, writhing mass of Intent. She gathers them up, into herself, into the radius of her perfume[.](http://mistersourwolftoyou.tumblr.com/post/101554075576) Then she quiets them. Lulls their pain with all the capacity for compassion she possesses. She tells them  _she’s sorry_. She tells them  _she’s here_. She tells them  _they are not alone_.  _They are loved and cherished and precious[.](http://octaviaing.tumblr.com/post/56617587738)_  And they flock to her, like moths to a flame. She beckons them home.

“Show me,” she commands.

She can feel the pressure of them against her mind, drawing out her power, draining her energy. Distantly she is aware that it’s cold.

Her body shivers.

There is a great swell of noise, like the crest of a wave before it breaks. Their cacophonous roar blurs and homogenizes into a single, cohesive voice. A beehive of ghosts that all respond with resounding force, “The Guardian has come. Chaos has fallen. Order will reign. The Grey Wolf has come.”

Unable to hold them any longer, Lydia exhales a breath and  _lets go_. She releases the Dead; let’s them fly out of the bubble of her senses. After their liberation she always finds it difficult to pull herself back together.

It starts with a feeling of bonelessness, as if the barriers of her mind have been penetrated, allowing her to slowly leak from the vessel of her body. She is seeping into the forest around her. So she siphons the murky, nebulous vapor of her soul back. Pulls it down and in and holds it tight. Like fingers squeezing clay, she always loses parts of herself to the process. But eventually, she is mostly whole.

It’s only then that she is aware enough of the physical world to realize that she’s on her knees in the mud. Her stockings are torn, there’s a root scraping her shin. Her blood mixes in the muck; there is clay between her fingers and under her nails.

“Lydia?” Derek’s voice is soft and uncertain.

“How long?” she asks him, fearful the answer. But from the way her voice feels thick and sharp, she knows she’s been screaming.

“A few hours,” he says and Lydia can hear him take several wet steps towards her.

She realizes it’s raining. She shivers. She’s worries she won’t be able to stand, but Derek is beside her before she has to do the embarrassing thing and ask for help.

His hands burn like fire as they close around her arms. He hauls her up, her legs are jelly and it only takes a second before she’s tilted and swooped into his arms. She can feel the warmth of his skin bleeding through his soaking shirt and into her right side. He scalds her where they touch. Lydia fears she’ll bear the scars of touching him forever.

“What happened?” He asks as he carries her towards the road. His pace is even and slow.

“Something killed him. The Guardian,” she says but there is no recognition in him at the name. “They said ‘The Guardian has come... Chaos... chaos has fallen. Order will... reign? The Grey Wolf has come?’” She struggles to repeat exactly what they’d said. But it’s difficult. Already she can feel the memory of it slipping away. But she knows she must have said something significant because she can feel a shift in Derek’s body, a tensing that migrates from his shoulders to his back to the tips of his fingers. “You know what that means.” It isn’t a question.

“Rest now,” Derek instructs and he settles her into the back seat of his squad car. The metal bars that separate them feel like an ominous warning she doesn’t have the strength to interpret.

“The body,” she interjects as he tucks his leather jacket around her. It smells like gun oil[.](http://hinatashoyyo.tumblr.com/post/82820720577)

“I’ll take care of it,” he tells her and Lydia loses the will to remain. Instead, she turns inward. Pulls all that she is into the center of her, protected, shielded from murder and blood and death. Her senses fail, and she is left with the enduring impression of music and sorrow. There is something else, something primal and deep that slips from her grasp. She falls into a fitful sleep as she chases it down and back, like falling through time.

\--

Derek sighs and runs his hands through his wet hair. Little droplets of water shatter and fling themselves across his dashboard. He inhales deeply, taking the scent of Lydia past his human senses. He can smell her perfume, mud, the lingering hint of unscented soap. But beyond that, under the notes of personal scent is the odor of emotions. Those delicate whiffs of chemical signatures that alight a sympathetic response in his lycan senses.

He can  _feel_  her duress. The stunted ache of fatigue. Fear that vibrates along the base of his spine. But underneath that, hidden deep inside the swirling, fragrant cloud of feelings he can just barely feel her guilt. It’s something like shame. Half pain, half joy.

Derek drops his head into his hands. She’s relieved that he’s dead, Peter. And Derek can’t even bring himself to judge her for it, because he's relieved too. He feels like a countdown that started five years ago has finally timed out. There is something that eases in his chest.

In fact, he finds he's satisfied. He’s knows what today is. He knows what Peter took from her; he'd felt her fear crawl its way up his vertebrae every time she was around his uncle. There was something profoundly disturbing about possession that she had never learned to hide. Derek had always wished he could have done something to help her, to alleviate some of that panic. But he knew better. That kind of horror lived in her bones. She would be buried with it someday.

He leaves the heater running and locks the car when he goes back to the clearing. He spends most of the night burying Peter beside Laura, his pack, and the bones of his family. When he finally had the old, burned-out shell of his childhood home demolished, he’d moved their remains to higher ground. About a mile from the overlook, in a remote clearing, deep in the heart of his family’s territory, he dug nine graves. Peter’s makes ten.

By the time he's done with this grave he will have dug 80 feet. One more and he could have buried two school buses, end to end, in all the graves he’s dug.

He burns the body, just to be sure. Then carefully lines the grave with wolfsbane, like the rest. It's a small measure of ceremony that seems fitting.

Dawn is cresting through the trees by the time he’s finished. His uniform is caked in dirt and blood. He stinks like sweat and death. The scent of his family’s graveyard clings to him.

He stands there, unsure what to do next. If he should say something. He and Peter never had the best relationship. But they were family. And he had so little of it left.

“I hope you find some peace,” Derek tells the unmarked grave. “Goodbye, Uncle Peter.”

And that seems to be the end of that. Derek stumbles back to his car, exhausted, dirty, and strangely purged. He finds Lydia exactly where he left her, curled under his jacket in the backseat of his car.

“It's over now,” he tells her sleeping silhouette as he puts the car in drive. “Legally, he was already dead anyway,” Derek mumbles to himself and its a wry kind of humor. It's a consolation, a distant balm to sooth the stab of grief that reminds him of a phantom limb.

\--

Once he’s settled her on his couch and safely locks himself away in the bathroom, Derek takes a moment to breathe. There is a stillness to the night that alarms him. It is so at odds with the urgency that pours into his every action, he struggles to reconcile it. He feels the loss, the danger, the threat in his bones. As if Lydia's scream last night had woken something in him, something young and fearful.

He feels like he’s a teenager again, newly orphaned and on the run. He is anxious and unsteady. He spends the rest of the morning standing watch over her. He’s not sure if her presence is hurting or helping. But watching the even rise and fall of her chest lulls him into a trance where the rest of the world falls away.

He doesn’t have to think about what it felt like when the full force of her wailing struck him, like the shockwave of an explosion. He doesn’t have to think about how he found her, eyes glowing white[,](http://rosweldrmr.tumblr.com/post/109879692082) the ghost of a broken whine still dying in her throat.

Instead, he remembers another morning he’d watched her hair shift in the shadows of a pastel sunrise. Back when she was still learning to control her powers. Back when she’d come to him with hope and determination and so much life and demanded that he  _help her_.

It’d only been a few months since Allison’s death, and they were all still reeling. But Lydia took that rage, that grief and turned it on the rest of the world. She came to him like she had something to prove, like she owed it Allison to become stronger. Unlike Stiles, who seemed to be turning in, folding up into the dark places he couldn’t see past.

And there was something about her that made Derek relent. Maybe it was guilt, for trying to kill her when he thought she was the Kanima. Or maybe it was because he needed it too, that feeling of being useful, of control. Whatever it was, it meant that she quickly became a semi-permanent fixture in his life.

They worked together to research. They started with what they had, the Beastiary. But since the Argents only seemed to keep detailed records of the creatures they hunted, it was virtually no help. From there, they expanded their search to include obscure internet sites but Derek quickly got sick of trudging through online fantasy game character directories. Finally, after some convincing from Lydia, he asked Deaton for help. The next week five crates of books arrived at his loft.

He turned out to be much more useful interpreting French, German and Turkish (his mother would have been proud) than anything else. Lydia could already translate Archaic Latin, Greek, and Gaelic. They spent long hours reading and taking notes. Together, they were amassing their own library of knowledge. Stiles called it their  _Encyclopedia Beastantica_.

It was a strange truce, what he and Lydia had come to inhabit. And the absurdity of it struck him sometimes. When it was just the two of them and it was sleeting, when she was curled up under his only blanket and nursed a cooling cup of tea, the fact that he had once ordered her death is almost comical.

But somehow they seemed to work. Lydia had a mind for research, the way she recalled details and filed away information to be recalled later. Derek found that it complimented his particular brand of learning. The way she could almost anticipate what he needed, predict how he organized his notes. They were naturally suited to work together.

But progress was slow as weeks bled into months. Derek built bookshelves and categorized their borrowed library and watched as Lydia, day by day, seemed to lose that determination she’d come to him with. That fire; that passion was dwindling. Each time she finished another book that didn’t mention banshees, or worse, mentioned them but just said the same thing they already knew, he had to watch as she gave up a little bit more hope.

And the farther she fell into herself, the more she pulled away, the more Derek wished he was better at this kind of thing. Being human. Giving comfort. But his only experience with comforting women usually involved sex and betrayal. So for once he did the smart thing and left her alone. Let her mourn in whatever way she preferred.

They finally had some luck with an obscure Turkish text that read more like an almanac than an encyclopedia. It was old though, and after translating the Azerbaijani, he felt like maybe they’d turned a corner. There was an entire chapter that recounted the life of a banshee who migrated from Greece to Istanbul in the 1500's. Unfortunately the story wasn’t a happy one. According to the account, she went insane when she was in her 20's and ended up throwing herself off a cliff into the ocean.

But it wasn't until they were combing through local records from Eichen House, trying to find other banshees drawn to Beacon Hills, like Meredith, that she finally cracked. It was a name. Just like any other, on a long list of patients who heard voices.

The name wasn't just a name, though. It was a person. A memory Lydia still clung to like the seven-year-old she was the last time she saw her grandmother.

“She called me Ariel. I asked her to. It was my favorite book. I made her read it over and over again. I wouldn't respond to anything else. She took me to the coast once. We sat on the beach and listened to the waves. It was too cold to swim. She was committed a few months later. She died in Eichen House when I was 13.” She cried as she told him the story, the scent of her pain made him ache with it. He felt her grief, as hot and sharp as the day her grandmother died.

He let her cry. Hovering unsurely in the kitchen, desperate for an escape. But her sorrow filled his loft, eclipsed the smell of anything but tears and her. He thinks about it to this day. That was the day she decided not to go to college. She never told him so, of course. They never spoke of that day again. But Derek is almost sure.

After that, she was different. She didn't talk about the future anymore. All her dreams about college and after seemed to dry up. Instead she threw herself into research, desperate to understand her powers. She even went to Peter for help.

Derek asked her about it, how she could trust him after everything he'd done. She just shrugged and said there was no one else. Derek didn't respond, just nodded and bit his tongue. He wanted to tell her that she still had him. But that seemed weird and felt like crossing a line he wasn't sure he was willing to cross.

It was around that time her eyes started to glow when she connected to the afterlife. In fact, it'd gotten to the point that Lydia could not only predict death, but prevent it. But the stronger she got, the more distant she became.

She stopped coming to the loft abruptly a few years ago. He still kept her tea in his cupboards. He's not sure why. But he's happy he has it right now.

He makes her a cup before he leaves for work. He sits it on the coffee table near her head and lingers for a minute. Finally he scrawls a note on the back of an envelope and leaves it by her tea.

He locks the door behind him, a strange ball of tension forms in his chest. Stretches the muscles of his heart taunt, like he senses danger. He pulls out his phone and makes a call. There's only six people on his favorites list. Scott is number three.

“Hey,” Scott picks up on the first ring. “What's up?” he sounds out of breath, like he's been running.

“Peter's dead. We might have a problem. I'm going to work now, I'll let you know.”

“Oh,” Scott says it like he's not sure what to say. “Dude, I'm sorry. I mean, I know he was an ass and everything, but still. I'm sorry. Let me know what I can do. I'm here. Whatever you need.”

“Thanks,” Derek responds awkwardly and hangs up.

He sighs again; it's going to be a long day.

\--

The way is dark. The moon is gone. The black stretches on like a great beast that has unfurled its wings.

Lydia shivers in the cold. She is alone.

“Wake up,” a voice says into the void.

Lydia gasps for air, clawing at her throat.

“Wake up,” someone whispers. “He is coming for you.”

They are so quiet now; the silence nearly drowns them out.

“Almost time,” Allison beckons, arms outstretched. Her eyes are white marbles. She smiles and opens her mouth. But there is no sound. Just a buzzing.

\--

Lydia wakes to overcast, midday sun filtering in through grungy floor to ceiling windows. She's caught off guard for a few minutes before she's able to place the soft aroma of black breakfast tea and musty books. Derek's loft will always smell of books. She takes a deep breath, and the familiarity of this place sets her racing heart at ease.

She's safe.

She's alone. But she knows she is safe. She hears vibrating and digs through her purse on the coffee table.

“Hello?”

“I told you she was sleeping,” Lydia can hear Derek's scornful tone in the background.

“Lydia,” the Sheriff says, “We need to talk.”

“Yes sir,” she says, her heart skips a beat. No matter how old she is, talking to Stiles' dad always makes her feel sixteen.

“Council meeting, my place. Six o'clock.”

“See you there,” she nods and he hangs up.

Lydia flops back, hiding her face in the blanket she was under. She hates council meetings. She hates that Beacon Hills has a secret group of key officials that meet to discuss supernatural things. She hates she's a member. But most of all, she hates that this will mean calling Scott and Stiles.

They don't even live in town anymore. She's happy for them; that they got out. She's jealous too, of course. But they don't need to know that. There was a time when she thought maybe it might be possible for her too, to escape. But then she'd found out about her grandmother, and the fate that seemed to wait all banshees. So she decided it was better to spend what lucid years she had left in service of her town.

Most days she doesn’t regret the decision. But today isn’t most days. And waking up in Derek's loft only serves to drive that point home. Back when she was 18 and still hoped for the best, there was a time when she spent almost everyday here. It was a time when she thought maybe she'd found something important, something precious and fleeting that she can only barely imagine. They are times she recalls fondly, wistfully even. She was almost happy then.

But she was wrong. And waking up here, seeing the messy ‘Happy birthday’ note and cup of tea he left for her only makes it worse.

\--

Her three year old calico cat[,](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aibell) Abiell greets her when she gets home. She cries loudly and winds her body around Lydia's legs as she heads for the bathroom.

“Okay, okay. I see you. Here,” she bends down and scratches her face. “You are loved. Now let me take a shower you mangy beast,” she teases.

Living alone wasn't so bad, at first. But Lydia soon found that talking helped quiet the other voices. She had goldfish initially. But when she found a filthy, matted kitten hiding in her wheel well one cold January morning, she couldn't help herself.

“It's fine,” Lydia tells Aibell as she climbs into the shower. She can already feel the tears gathering, and a pressure in her mind mounting. “It's fine. I'm fine. Everything will be okay,” Lydia speaks to herself now, turning the knob to hot and sitting under the spray long enough to let her skin wrinkle and the temperature to cool. Her skin turns pink and the cut on her shin from last night stings.

\--

She was scared. Finding Peter like that, without any warning... Nothing like that had happened in years. She usually had a sense about these things. She could Hear it, Feel it. But last night she couldn't even remember how she'd gotten there. She had to take a cab home this morning.

And the feeling of powerlessness, of lost time and an ominous presence makes her anxious. She is sorry, sort of, about Peter. More sorry for Derek than anything else. Peter had been a monster, sure. But there was a time when he was  _their_  monster. And she could acknowledge that. She understands that. But it never changed who he was. What he was. It can never erase the months she'd lost to him in her sophomore year.

No matter how many times he came through, there was always something in it for him. He was self serving in all that he did.

Lydia wonders if he regretted it, in the end. If he felt remorse before he died. She wonders if it would have made a difference.

\--

Derek checks his email and files two reports from cases last week. Then he files one 'council' report from a month ago that he's been putting off. A beta was killed and her body buried in the preserve. No supernatural foul play appeared to be at work, but it was protocol to log all supernatural related crimes with the council.

A necessary inconvenience. One that Derek has to admit is useful. After Stiles had clued his father into the goings on of Beacon Hills 'animal control' problems, he'd recruited Derek almost immediately. Especially after what happened with Allison and the nogitsune.

He said the town deserved 'a little more protection than the police force could provide'. Derek agreed.

And he thought of what his mother had said, about protecting Beacon Hills. That it was a Hale right, to defend what was theirs. And even if Derek wasn't an Alpha, Beacon Hills always had been and always would be home.

Scott thought it was a great idea. And anything that protected Stiles' dad was a-okay in Stiles' book. So he'd signed on. Became a deputy.

Deputy Hale, they call him.

He doesn't carry a gun. “It slows me down,” he'd told the Sheriff when asked.

“Weapons are SOP, son,” the Sheriff said in that kindly, pseudo-fatherly way.

To which Derek just grew his claws and fangs and flashed his eyes. The Sheriff didn't ask about it again.

It was around that time that Lydia asked him for help researching banshees. That had been a strange point in Derek's life.

He was surrounded by more people than he'd been around in years. Not since before the fire. And okay, maybe he hadn't handled it all really well. Maybe he'd told Lydia she was being stupid. Maybe he'd lost his temper and they had a falling out. Maybe he yelled a little more than was strictly necessary. But he was doing his best, especially given the rash of mysterious and paralyzing nightmares that cropped up around that time.

Eventually they got the bad guy and he got the hang of it, of being a co-worker and employee and friend and council member. The 'council of crazy' as Stiles liked to call them.

The Sheriff, Deaton, Melissa, Chris (when he came back from France), Lydia, him, and Scott and Stiles. There were others, at certain points. Satomi for a little while. Before she got frustrated with all the rules and moved her pack elsewhere. Mrs. Yukimura, until Kira graduated and left for college. Then she and Kira's dad had gone back to New York. Even Peter for a month before they realized he only volunteered because he was trying to get something from Scott.

They kept records of what was going on in Beacon Hills, any supernatural creatures they knew of, which hunters were causing trouble, and anyone new in town.

The Nemeton did exactly what Deaton had warned them it would. It drew creatures to it. Stiles called it the Hellmouth. Secretly, Derek thought the comparison was eerily accurate.

But the reports were tedious, and Derek fought them tooth and nail at first. Refused to keep records or report on people he considered 'non threatening'. But about six months in, when everything was falling apart, there was a woman who came to town. Someone who, among other things, was capable of causing horrible nightmares.

There were a few deaths, people who had heart attacks in their sleep. They didn't notice the pattern at first. But they started getting younger. A man in his early 50's, a woman in her 40's. But when a high schooler died, Melissa was the one who put it together. They eventually figured out what she was. A malevolent spirit who haunted guilty souls[.](http://saeruth.tumblr.com/post/98630790619)

After that, Derek stopping fighting the Sheriff's procedures. He knew it was only because of the council and the information they shared that they were able to stop her before she killed even more. Derek counted himself among those saved, as did Stiles and Deaton - though they never spoke about it. Well, to be fair, the council wasn't the only reason they'd stopped her.

That was Lydia's first official case as a 'Psychic' consultant for the police department. It wasn't long before she had her own seat on the council and her own business. She outsourced some of the work to him or the Sheriff if she was hired for something not supernatural.

And they helped, because having her as a legitimate resource for them was well worth it.

She was worth it.

That's how Derek finds himself staring blankly at an empty word doc for the past forty five minutes while he tries to figure out how to write a report about Peter. Even in death, he was annoying Derek.

And he's struck with a wave of nostalgia that takes him back to high school. Back when he was just a kid, just a punk werewolf who couldn't control The Shift. Peter had been the one to help him master it. Taught him to use anger as an anchor.

And now, he's gone. And with him, the last piece of his past that was within reach. He would have to tell Cora next time she checked in. Which could mean tomorrow or in three months.

She reminded him of their mom. Free spirit and all that.

He'd have to empty out Peter's apartment. Besides his computer, he doubted there was anything of much value. Unless you counted his extensive collection of V-necks as valuable. Which he didn't.

Next to him, his phone buzzes and Lydia's name appears above a text on his lock screen.

‘All set for tonight,’ the message reads.

‘Ok,’ he texts back and reluctantly gets started on his report.

\--

The meeting is a small affair. Deaton, Melissa, and Chris are already waiting when Lydia arrives. She waits on the porch for the Sheriff and Derek to get there. She stands a little straighter when she sees Derek; the memory of how he carried her last night is still fresh in her mind. She’s sure he can feel her embarrassment because he raises an eyebrow and she blushes.

“Ms. Martin,” the Sheriff greets her, already unhooking his holster as they head inside.

“Lyds!”

Lydia is thrown at hearing Scott’s voice. He charges at her from around the couch, Stiles flanking him.

“Scott! Stiles? What are you doing here?” she shoots Derek a look that she trusts he will understand. She accuses him of calling them. He looks away and greets Deaton, so she takes it as an admission of guilt.

“We heard about Peter,” Scott says and Lydia is constantly amazed at his capacity for empathy. He can back to mourn with Derek. The man who bit him, who ruined his life. Scott had more reason than any of them to hate him, but he doesn’t. Lydia doesn't think he's capable of hating anyone.

“New big bad in town, we couldn’t miss that!” Stiles jokes and hugs her. But she can feel the tension in his shoulders, and she’s sure the werewolves in the room are vibrating with his anxiety.

She kisses him on the cheek, “It’s good to see you,” she says and Jesus, does she mean it. It’s been so long since they’ve been together. “Where’s Kira?” she asks Scott.

“She’s interviewing for a fellowship this weekend in the city, but she’ll be here as soon as she can,” Scott tells her.

They’ve been an item since their sophomore year of high school and Lydia is happy that they seemed to have grown towards each other in college rather than away. The three of them live in San Francisco. Stiles is just finishing up an internship as a clerk in an attorney's office. He’s majoring in criminal justice, and is still working out exactly what field of Justice he wants to go into. Scott is pre-med Lydia thinks it’s likely he will pursue nursing. Melissa is proud, and he seems to be so naturally suited to the work. Kira just recently surprised them when she changed her major from computer science to physics. Lydia has no doubt she will go on to do great things with superconductors.

“Scott,” Derek greets, a firm handshake and then turns to do the same with Stiles, though maybe a little less firmly than he had with Scott.

“Hey man,” Scott says as they all head for the dining room table.

There’s a few pizza boxes already opened, and cold beers waiting for them when they finally sit.

It’s been a few months since Lydia’s seen Deaton and she waves from across the table. He smiles at her, the same mystery expression he always seems to wear.

“Let’s get down to business,” Derek starts. His plate is empty. Next to him, Lydia takes a slice of pepperoni and puts it on his plate. He doesn’t say anything about it, just looks down for a second like he’s not sure what she’s doing.

“I found Peter’s body last night. I had no sense of impending death. And I was in a fugue state when I found him. I think I walked to the preserve,” Lydia confesses and looks down at her own steaming slice.

“I tracked her scent,” Scott says, nodding. “She walked.”

“They called it ‘The Guardian’,” she tells them.

“The Guardian?” The Sheriff asks, a note of exasperation to his voice. He is, by far, the most pragmatic of the council. He still scoffs at things like ghouls, whereas the rest of them just learned to accept things as they came.

“Never heard of it,” Chris says, leaning back in his chair and crossing his arms.

“Tell us more,” Deaton asks. That same carefully neutral expression that he uses to hide whatever it is he knows but isn't ready to share.

“They said,” Lydia pauses, trying to remember the exact words the Dead had used. “‘The Guardian has come. Chaos has fallen. Order will reign. The Grey Wolf has come.’”

“The Grey Wolf,” Derek emphasizes and Lydia sees a look pass between he and Deaton.

“Would you like to share with the rest of us?” The Sheriff asks, because they can all tell the two of them know something.

“I’ve heard of a Grey Wolf. It’s a legend, among our kind. It’s a story we tell our kids, like a fable,” Derek explains and Lydia wonders if his father told him the story when he was little. “The story says if you disrupt the balance of nature, a Grey Wolf will come to restore it.”

“Okay?” Stiles asks. “But, like,  _how_  will he restore balance?”

“It’s a kids’ bedtimes story, Stiles. We don’t tell them it’s going to kill them. But, well…”

“That’s exactly what the legend says,” Deaton finishes, rubbing his chin. “It’s a story all emissaries know. Though, I’ve never heard him referred to as ‘The Guardian’. But essentially when there’s chaos and disorder and the balance of the natural and the supernatural has been disrupted, he kills those responsible to restore order. I’ve never heard of it  _actually_  happening.”

“Well if you wanted to restore order, Peter’s a good place to start.” The Sheriff says and all eyes turn to him. “Though if this wolf stops chaos, where was he four years ago?”

Maybe it isn’t the way Lydia would have phrased it, but she knows it’s a good point. Next to his father, Stiles straightens and carefully avoids eye contact with anyone.

“So, is that the end? Peter’s gone. Balance is restored. So, will he just… leave?” Scott asks the table at large.

“‘Order will reign,’” Derek says. And the sound of his voice repeating what the Dead had said is so unnerving, a shiver runs up her spine. “ _Will_ ,” Derek emphasizes. “I don’t think he’s done yet.”

“How sure are we that ghosts understand the use of future tense vs. past tense?” Stiles asks and she can tell he’s joking. But she thinks maybe he’s scared, maybe it’s fear that makes him hope for the best.

“He’s still here,” Lydia finally says.

“How do you know?” Melissa asks her. She’s usually pretty quiet during these meetings. Lydia knows why. This isn’t her world. But she’s always thoughtful and careful in her deliberations. Lydia is immeasurably grateful for another female presence at the table, especially at times like these, when words fail her.

How can she explain it, what the air feels like? How heavy she feels, like something has settled over the town, blanketing it in darkness?

“She can feel it,” Derek answer for her as she struggles with how to articulate what it's like.

“Its cold,” she finally settles on. “Not… not out there,” she gestures at the windows behind her. “In here,” she says, holding an open palm to her chest. “I can feel it. Something old and powerful. Something’s coming,” she says and struggles to stay in the present.

But there is a rise in the volume of the Dead who chatter in her head. She can Feel them, trying to get in. Trying to slip into the cracks of her barriers, invade her senses. Drive her insane.

Derek’s hand on hers under the table abruptly stops them. The second his warm palm closes around her hand, the room is quiet again.

She risks a glance at Scott and she can see that he’s worried, the way his eyes go wide and expressive. Trying to ask what he doesn’t say. They both must have felt her panic. She wants to thank Derek, ask him how he knew it would work, holding her hand. But Deaton is saying something about asking his sister and Lydia doesn’t want to interrupt. But more than that, she doesn’t want to admit that it’s getting worse. So she squeezes his hand a little and he squeezes back and then lets go.

“So, what’s the plan?” Scott asks the group.

“I’m going to get Peter’s computer. He might have something on it about ‘The Guardian’ or the Grey Wolf,” Derek tells them. “And I’ll check the books I’ve got.”

“We need more information,” Lydia agrees. “I’ll… consult,” she says. It’s a euphemism, a side effect of her phony business. But she also learned a long time ago that when she said things like ‘talk to the Dead’ it made the others really uncomfortable.

“Just be careful,” Deaton warns her. “If this thing was powerful enough to kill Peter without you knowing, it must be dangerous.”

“I’ll stay with her,” Stiles volunteers. “You know, just to make sure she doesn’t get sucked in, or whatever.”

\--

They agree and plan to meet again in a week once they have more information. Derek can feel Lydia’s embarrassment as surely as he sees her cheeks flair pink. She feels bad Stiles has to babysit her. But what worries him even more is the way she seemed to almost slip away tonight.

The way she was sitting right next to him, but her chemo scents almost disappeared entirely. Almost like they had last night when he found her. He could get no sense of what she was feeling, or what she had been feeling when she walked from her apartment. It was only because he was so familiar with her personal scent that he was able to track her through the rain.

He feels uncomfortable, antsy. The way she'd said ‘something’s coming,’ makes him itch to do something. Hunt someone. Draw his claws and go for the kill. He hasn’t been hunting in a while, he’s been too busy with work lately. Maybe he just needs to run.

He tells the Sheriff he’ll find his own way home, since they’d driven together. He, Melissa, Scott, Stiles and Lydia stay to catch up. Chris and Deaton leave when he does. Deaton pulls him aside before he gets in his car.

“How is she?” Deaton asks. Derek doesn’t have to ask who.

“Scared, relieved, anxious,” Derek answers, cataloging the emotions he feels as the takes a deep breath, picking out her unique scent and focusing on what it makes him feel.

“Does she seem… unstable?”

“Unstable how?” Derek asks, not sure what he’s getting at.

“Banshees are in touch with part of the world you and I will never know. She’s acutely attuned to death, and yet she couldn’t feel this. Banshees predict death, they herald it. Death is an essential part of life. But Lydia doesn’t just know when someone’s going to die. She tries to stop it.”

Derek feels the urge to roll his eyes. “Yeah, I got that.”

“She is an imbalance,” Deaton warns.

“You think…?” Derek trails off. He doesn’t want to say it, to even think it. “He’s coming for her?”

“There are others,” Deaton says, “in Beacon Hills who have sown more discord and turmoil than she has. But not many. I think it’s possible he will come for her, eventually.”

And suddenly the run he was so looking forward to seems ridiculous. “Thanks,” he says and shakes Deaton’s hand. “Find out what you can, I’ll make sure she’s okay.”

\--

A few hours after the others left Lydia is falling asleep on the couch. She wants to go home, take a shower, and curl up in bed with her cat. But she feels bad asking Stiles to take her home, she knows he hasn’t seen his dad in over six months. And this is his family.

Just when she’s about to suck it up and say goodnight, there is a light knocking at the front door. Everyone turns a suspicious eye at it.

The Sheriff’s hand reaches for his gun, which isn’t there.

“It’s Derek,” Scott tells them. “Come in!” he calls.

“Hey, what’s up?” The Sheriff asks.

Derek has shed his uniform shirt and is down to a white undershirt. “Not much, just did a quick check of the area. Everything seems fine, for now.” He walks halfway to the kitchen, but stops next to the couch. Lydia looks up at him and gets the strange impression that he’s trying to speak with his eyebrows. He raises them and extends a hand.

It takes Lydia a few seconds to put it together. He’s offering to take her home.

“Oh,” she says and stands quickly. The rest of them turn to look at her. “I’m pretty tired.” And before Stiles can stand she adds, “Derek, would you mind taking me home tonight? If you don’t mind,” she turns to Stiles, “I don’t want to interrupt.”

“No... I didn’t mean--” Stiles starts to stand but Derek cuts him off.

“No, it’s fine. Stay,” he says to Stiles. “I got this.”

\--

They leave together, Derek is careful not to let Scott sense the urgency with which he wants to get Lydia alone. She drove, so he climbs into the passenger seat of her car and waits for her to break the silence.

Finally, a few blocks from the Stilinski’s, she speaks.

“Thanks for that, I was about to fall asleep.”

“It’s fine. I was around,” Derek lies. He’d been out sniffing for new scents in town. But he only ever made it a quarter mile from the Sheriff’s place because he was so freaked out by what Deaton had said. “Let me ask you something.” Lydia doesn’t agree, but she doesn’t disagree either so he takes it a sign to continue. “What happened to you tonight. It felt like you were… disappearing.”

Lydia tilts her head, she chews on the inside of her cheek. Derek can hear it. “Disappearing…” she repeats the world, like she’s trying it out. “Yeah, that’s a good description.”

“So?” he asks, trying to keep his voice flat.

“Sometimes, when I’m not paying attention, they sneak up on me. When I want to… commune…”

“Talk with dead people,” he corrects her and she laughs.

“Yeah, when I want them to speak to me I have to let them in. But sometimes when I’m distracted or they’re really eager they try to sneak in when I’m not ready for them. And sometimes, like tonight, it feels like they’re taking over.”

“And where do you go when that happens?” he asks, trying to conceptualize an abstract visual of blue smoke creeping into Lydia’s lungs. He’s not sure if it’s an accurate image of what it’s like, but when she talks about Seeing and Hearing, he finds its more helpful for him to understand if he pictures something, some visual to accompany the things she tries to describe.

“I guess I disappear,” she shrugs.

“You should be more careful,” he says and pointedly looks out the window.

“It helped, you know,” She says after an extra beat of silence. “You, physical contact. I think it keeps me grounded. When I’m like that, it’s hard to focus on the physical world. Tactile stimulation is an effective way to anchor me.” She says it so clinically. Like ‘Hey, thanks for providing tactile stimulation’ when all he did was hold her hand.

\----

Lydia is experiencing one of those rare moments of surrealism in her life. Like the day she realized werewolves were real. Like the day she saw Jackson come back to life… though that might have been the same day, actually. Like the day Jennifer Blake told her what she was. But this isn’t anything so life altering.

Tonight, Derek Hale is sleeping on her couch.

Stripped down to his boxer briefs, covered in an old macramed blanket that smells like mothballs. He’s using one of her pillows. He’s got his back turned out, his face buried in the cushions.  

Lydia is standing in the hall to the kitchen, watching him. Her nightly ritual of a 2:00 AM glass of water forgotten.

There is a werewolf in her apartment. And currently, her cat is sleeping on his head.

She’s trying desperately not to giggle. She grips her side and tries to hold it in, earning a feeling of euphoric, manic, glee for her effort.

The whole thing is ridiculous. Her life is one unbelievable thing after the next.

“Something funny?” Derek calls from the couch, his face still hidden from view and Lydia slams a hand over her mouth as something like laughter erupts from her core. Except this is so much worse than just laughing. This is months without it, this is insomnia and fear and the weight of Beacon Hills lifting from her shoulders. This is unexpected, so she cannot guard against it. This is a fit of laughter that takes root in her stomach and shakes the foundation of who she has become.

“I’m sorry,” she chokes, giving up any hope of containing it. She hides her face in her hands and tries not to snort. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”

“Who can sleep with all this noise?” Derek finally moves, slowing sitting up to face her and Lydia watches in utter horror as Abiell slides down the pillow as he moves away, finally stopping as she curls around his arm. There is an audible increase in the sound of her purring. He takes one look at her cat, and gives Lydia the most desperately straight face she’s ever seen. “What the hell is wrong with this thing anyway? Shouldn’t it be scared of me?”

Lydia has to sit down she’s laughing so hard now. Tears are streaming down her face and she buries her head in the carpet of her living room. “I’m sorry,” she wheezes over and over but she can’t stop herself from laughing. Eventually she can breathe enough to rasp out “I don’t know. You’re the first werewolf she’s met.”

To say Derek is not amused would be a gross understatement. But she can’t help it. There is really no power in the universe that could make this not funny.

“You’re a bad person,” he tells her and Lydia nods.

“I know. I’m sorry,” She agrees and finally pulls herself together enough to get up and retrieve her cat. “Come here,” she says as she scoops her up and cradles her against her chest. She bounces with her a few times and scratches her cheek.

“We never speak of this,” Derek warns and Lydia cackles. But one look at his face and she can tell he’s serious.

“Fine, fine. Okay. I swear. No one will never know you like to cuddle with cats,” she concedes.

“What are you doing up anyway?” Derek asks and yawns.

Lydia shrugs and puts Abiell in her room and shuts the door. “Couldn’t sleep,” she says, coming back out to the living room. “And you, did she really keep you up?”

“No, she’s just sneaky. I didn’t even feel her get up there,” he looks a little embarrassed and Lydia tries not to laugh again.

She can’t think of anything else to say and they fall into a momentary silence. Derek is still sitting on her couch, her blanket slowing slipping from his shoulder. She watches it. Traces it’s path with her eyes as she is drawn back into the memory of another night.

~~

Derek is sitting cross-legged on his couch, a book about Kitsune’s tucked in his lap. Lydia watches him. It’s late, well past midnight and she knows she should go home. They’ve been researching most of the day. And tomorrow is a school day. She should get some sleep. But there is something mesmerizing about watching him read. The way his breathing falls into a steady, even cadence. Like sleep, except not as deep. Lydia’s seen him sleep a few times, when he’s passed on at the table or given up and crawled into bed while she powered through.

Her cup of tea is ice cold, and she wants to get another or heat this one up. But she can’t bring herself to move. There is something about him, the graceful line of his shoulders, his hands brushing against the pages of a book, the way she can see his eyelashes flutter as his eyes trace lines on the page. He’s beautiful.

The realization strikes Lydia, almost accidentally. She’s known him for almost three years, and she remembers thinking he was hot back when she was a Sophomore and he’d just come back to town. The mysterious Hale survivor come home. She’d heard rumors that he’d come back to hunt down the person responsible. She remembers, vividly, the borderline obsession she’d had with his leather jacket. But then, her crush faded, waned in the shadow of her breakup with Jackson.

And somewhere along the way, she’d gotten to know him and it never occurred to her until that night that maybe he could ever be something more. That maybe she  _wanted_  him to be more.

“You’re staring,” Derek mumbles, his head still stuck in the book.

“I just remembered I used to have a crush on you, when you first came back to Beacon Hills.”

“Weren’t you with Jackson?” he asks, looking up for the first time and Lydia smiles.

“Jackson and I had… issues with faithfulness,” she says and he smirks.

“What made you think of it?” he asks and Lydia is torn between lying or not. But considering he’s a werewolf and can listen to the beat of her heart, she decides it’s better to just be honest.

“The way you read,” she says. And it’s not a lie. But it’s not the whole truth either.

Derek smiles and goes back to reading, but Lydia can’t help but feel like something might have changed. Something between them that catches, like the first, delicate spark of a fire. Something that requires attention and oxygen or it will die. She can’t be sure, not yet, but she thinks maybe this is the beginning of something.

~~

“You’re staring,” Derek tells Lydia. She’s been standing in the same spot for a least a solid minute in complete silence. He would have been worried about her disappearing, but her eyes are dark and human. There’s no supernatural force at work in her sudden lapse in conversation.

“Just, thinking about something,” she says and the way her heart skitters makes Derek sure she’d been thinking about him. He can recall, with perfect clarity, so many occasions when they’d spent long hours into the night, keeping the other company. Reading and researching. Or sometimes, when they were bored and just couldn’t stand to read one more line, they would talk.

Not about creatures or monster, but normal things. Books they’d both read, their opinions on politics and international affairs. Movies and TV shows they’d both watched when they were younger. Sometimes she would even tell him about growing up in Beacon Hills, about her memory of the fire. Field Trips with Scott and Stiles. How she met Danny, what happened after Jackson left.

It was innocuous, innocent. But somewhere along the road all those talks, their books and stories and opinions constituted a friendship. It seemed to spring from somewhere between them. He was lonely and guilty and she was frustrated with her powers and needed help. They grew into the unused spaces of each other.

\--

“What happened to us?” Derek doesn’t even realize he’s asked the question until he hears Lydia’s heartbeat ratchet up to a frenzied tempo that sets the hairs on his arms on end.

“You know,” she says, barely more than a whisper.

“I remember we used to be close, closer,” Derek amends when he can hear her intake of breath, as if she’s about to argue with him. “But then you went to Peter for help and you stopped coming to the loft and I just don’t know why.”

“How can you pretend you don’t remember?” There is a fury in her words that chills him to the bone.

“We had a fight--”

“A fight! A fight? You told me to  _leave you alone_ , Derek. You kicked me out of your house and told me I was  _suffocating_  you. It wasn’t a fight, you  _attacked_  me,” And he is so caught off guard by her version of it that he stills.

He feels like maybe he’s crazy. He doesn’t remember that. He remembers being tired back then, drained. He’d only been a deputy for six months when the nightmares started. They had no way of knowing what was happening until the the high-schooler died, and by then the body count was almost as bad as the nogitsune's. The spirit that was haunting Beacon Hills, tormenting guilty souls, was making his life hell. And then when they realized it was supernatural, the Sheriff had hired Lydia to help.

He thought it was reckless, to put her in the middle of it. Especially when she was just finishing up school and should have been applying to colleges. But instead she spent every weekend with him researching and he was beginning to want her more than he wanted to[.](http://alphatruebie.tumblr.com/post/88000900577) He was exhausted and frayed. And it was around that time that Lydia realized her grandmother had gone insane because she was a banshee too.

So yeah, he hadn’t handled things really well. He’d snapped, he’d yelled. He’s even fairly sure he said  _some_  of the things Lydia remembers. But not  _like_  she remembers. He thinks its completely within the realm of possibility that he told her to leave one night. That  _he_  was suffocating. But he wouldn’t have thrown her out of his life. And the idea that this is what’s been keeping her away, this is what caused the rift between them wounds him.

“That’s not what--” he starts to defend himself but Lydia holds up a hand to stop him.

“I’m going to bed,” she tells him. “I’ll keep Aibell in my room so she won’t bother you.” It strikes him as tragic, how quickly her laughter has dried up. He misses it. All of a sudden, he’s bereft of it. He would give almost anything to go back in time just fifteen minutes.

But he knows that time is gone. So instead he mumbles a “Goodnight,” and settles back into the cushions of her couch, feeling infinitely shaken.

\--

Derek is gone before Lydia wakes up the next morning. And she’s still getting ready when he calls. The council won't have to wait a week for an update.

A jogger finds the body of Patrick Clarke along a trail in the preserve. A trail that Lydia knows leads right to the Nemeton. It’s the first body that Lydia hasn’t found in Beacon Hills in two years. And the guilt of it twists inside her. She should have known, she should have Felt it. She stands among the bystanders and watches the body bag get loaded into the coroner's van. She catches Derek’s eye from where he’s taking a witness statement from the jogger.

There is something that passes between them, an understanding, a deal. He wants her to wait for him. So Lydia goes back to her car and tries not to think about the angry ghost that buzzes annoyingly around her head. He is an irritation she doesn't need right now.

Finally, about an hour later, he knocks on her window.

“Hey,” Lydia says awkwardly, rolling it down.

“Hey,” Derek says back. “Take a walk with me.”

The weather is nice today and Lydia leaves her sweater in the car. They walk into the preserve for about twenty minutes in silence. And there is just something about being around him that makes the other voices calm[.](http://rashaka.tumblr.com/post/87282648397/)

The silence isn’t exactly a companionable one, given what happened last night. But it’s at least comfortable.

Eventually he stops and they sit on the broken remains of a wooden fence. It makes Lydia feel young, swinging her legs and watching the dried leaves under her feet scatter.

“His name was Patrick Clarke,” Derek reads from his notepad. “Moved here four years ago. No criminal record.” And she knows what comes next, why he brought her out to the middle of the preserve so no one could overhear their conversation.

So she casts her Sight out and past herself. The buzz that's been circling for the past hour finally morphs into a semblance of speech.

_Restore me. Restore me. Restore me._

Lydia tries to project a sense of peace. Of finality and acceptance. This is not the first time she's dealt with a new soul. They are often angry and confused. They don't always accept they are dead. And this particular ghost is demanding to be returned.

 _That's not possible._  Lydia Says, as best she can.  _But I want to help your soul be at ease. Tell me what happened. Who did this to you. And I will find you justice._

_Justice! You speak of justice?_

Finally the swirl of black fog where his voice comes from coalesces and transforms into a cohesive form. A single figure that is anything but a man.

Lydia gasps.

“What's wrong?” Derek asks and Lydia tries to straddle between being present and Seeing beyond the veil.

“He wasn't human,” she tells him.

“What was he?” Derek asks, taking a step towards her.

“I've never seen anything like it.” Lydia loses her awareness of Derek as she focuses on the figure. “He has glowing eyes and sharp teeth. He’s taller than a man, with long limbs. And there is a darkness,” she whispers, feeling the tendrils of what he is grasp onto her. “He’s trying to get in,” she only has time to warn Derek before he snaps into her.

Like a clap of thunder, Lydia suddenly finds herself expelled from her body. She can see the black mist surrounding her, it leaks from her eyes and mouth. And Lydia struggles to hold on. She tries to crawl back into herself, but he’s blocking her. And slowly, she begins to feel herself slipping away. Like a leaky faucet, he will bleed her dry.

\--

She barely has time to warn him before Derek can feel a shift in her. Her back straightens, her glowing eyes fix to an unseen point in the distance, and there is a darkness to her that makes him sick.

“What did you do to her?” Derek all but growls. “What are you?”

“Wendigo,” he speaks through her. And past the toneless, unnaturally deep register of Lydia’s voice, Derek can almost hear an echo of a man’s.

“Figures,” Derek huffs and draws his claws. “Why else would it come for you?”

“Who?” he asks.

“The Grey Wolf. The Guardian sent to restore balance. Figures he’d kill you after Peter.”

He smiles and Lydia’s blood-red lips turn up. The sight of it, of him tugging on her strings like a puppet makes something pull tight inside Derek. A careful rage he saves for later.

“Restore me,” he demands and Derek catches a whiff of Lydia’s rage. He feels it bolster him, allows him to focus.

“She won’t let you keep that body for long,” Derek warns. “How many have you killed?”

“More than can be counted,” he boasts and Derek laughs.

“I don’t know, I can count pretty high. There are no missing people in Beacon Hills.”

“I was smart!” He yells and there is a little more of Lydia’s voice this time.

“Don’t shit where you eat, makes sense.” Derek says flippantly and he makes that same eerie, toothy grin.

“Oh, but I wanted to,” he says and looks down at Lydia. “I used to watch this one,” he says as her hands begin to roam her body. “Imagine the fire of her hair fanned out over my killing cloth. She would have suffered so dearly. It improves the taste, you know, fear. I would have taken my time, savored her. I can still remember the sweet taste of a woman’s terror.”

Derek is on the cusp of losing control. He can feel the ache in his chest to flex his fingers and extend his fangs. His skin is alight with the all-consuming call for violence. And his anchor, his anger is threatening to spill over. “Get out,” he growls, his voicing coming out deeper and distorted because of his fangs.

He raises Lydia's hand up in front of her, her tongue running up her inner wrist until he stops. Her lips hovering just over her pulse.

Derek snaps. There is something deep and desperate about the rage he feels. Its a helpless kind of fury that he doesn’t know how to manifest. He won’t risk hurting her body, but he needs to get this creep out of her. Now.

That’s when he remembers what she said last night. About touch helping. It’s not a particularly well-developed idea, but it’s the only thing he can think of, so he seizes on it. He crowds Lydia’s body, pressing the heel of his hand into the soft skin of her neck. It’s meant to be an intimidating gesture, but really he does it to facilitate touching her.

“Come back,” he whispers in her ear as he envelops her entire body in something like a hug. But it’s so much more. He dips at the knees and slides her between his legs. His arms wrap around her shoulder and waist as he picks her up. He buries his nose in her neck and breathes in the scent of her. Uninhibited by space and social niceties, he allows it to eclipse everything.

And he prays. He prays its enough. He prays she’s strong enough. He prays and prays and prays.

\--

At the first touch of Derek’s hand to her neck, Lydia can feel her autonomy returning. The sensation of his skin, hot against her, brings her back. She remembers what it’s like to feel. And the thing that’s inhabiting her body is thrown at the contact.

It’s just a small window, but it’s enough. So Lydia crawls into the cavity of her body and aims for the center of herself. Her core, her heart, that part of herself that belongs to her, that nothing can touch, that welcomes her home. Once there she expands herself, unfolds the great expanse of her consciousness and forces him out. She chases behind his frantic, fleeing progress. Like he’s running from her.

And she realizes that’s exactly what’s happening. He’s afraid of her. And she can feel it now, why he fears her. Where the edges of her overlap him, he evaporates. She is destroying what she touches. She imagines the impression of stretching, she pushes up and out and there is a great rushing sensation as he tries to outpace her.

Once she’s taken possession of her body back, she continues out. Feathering the shining light of her Self out to surround the ever-shrinking swirl of his black smog.

 _Nowhere to run,_  she declares. Screams into the void, swallows up the plea of his soul for  _mercy_. She knows what he's done. She can see the faces of all the women he’s murder now. They gather around him in the forest, their terrified expressions softening as they watch her burning him up.

That kind of brutality taints a soul. It ties them to their killers. These poor women have been bound to him, hunted in life and trapped in death.

Lydia will give them freedom, peace, rest. Without hesitation she allows the cloud of her soul to smother his. And with one, frail whisper of  _Please_  Lydia snuffs out his existence.

\--

She wakes up a few hours later, on Derek’s couch. He’s sitting on his coffee table, the mid-afternoon sun casts shadows across his face that obscure his expression. So Lydia can’t tell if he’s angry or pensive or resting.

At her stirring, he kneels by her head and lightly touches her face. “You scared me,” he whispers. And it sounds so much like a confession, her breath catches in her throat.

“I’m sorry,” she says and leans forward. His forehead knocks against hers and he takes a deep, calming breath.

“Are you hurt?”

“No,” she says quickly. “It just took a lot of energy to do that.”

“Do what?” A voice from the other side of the room asks and Lydia pulls away from Derek so quickly she feels a tendon in her neck pull.

Deaton is standing near the window and Lydia wonders how she missed him before. “Sorry,” he apologizes. “Didn’t mean to startle you. Derek asked me to take a look at you. I told him you were resting, but…”

Derek finally stands and Lydia finds that she misses him. Misses him being in her space. “I just wanted to make sure,” he grumbles at Deaton.

“What happened to Patrick Clarke?” Deaton asks.

“I evicted him from my body,” she says and she tries to remember the details of it. But when she’s like that, outside herself, beyond the veil, she always finds it hard to form long term memories. “And then I destroyed his soul.”

“You what?” Derek asks and she can hear his disbelief. “I didn’t know that was something you could do,” he looks horrified.

“Neither did I,” she admits and lays back.

“Is that why…” Derek trails off and gestures up and down at this body.

“What?” Lydia asks, confused.

“Right before you passed out,” Derek tells her, “You…”

“He said you were glowing.” Deaton answers for him. Lydia crinkles her nose and looks at Derek for confirmation.

“It was like you were made of light,” he says quietly. “Like it was coming from under your skin. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Lydia frowns. She can barely recall the sensation of running and pushing. She remembers anger, the faces of his victims. But she was so removed from the physical world at that point there’s no way she could remember. “Well, that’s… new?” she says, shrugging.

“You’re sure you’re okay?” Derek asks again and Lydia can see the way Deaton eyes him carefully. She really must have really freaked him out. She pictures Derek showing up at the Vet office, carrying her unconscious form,  _demanding_  Deaton help him. _  
_

“I feel fine, really,” she reassures him, as best she can.

“Well, I’m glad you’re safe,” Deaton tells her. “Stiles is on his way to take you home.”

Her eyes find Derek’s and she wants to object. She wants to ask to stay. But he looks away, so she resigns herself to the feeling of regret that’s slowing eroding her from the inside when it comes to Derek. “Okay.”

“Maybe,” Derek says, his voice full of a hesitancy that Lydia doesn’t usually associate with him. “She should stay here.” He won’t meet her eyes and she wishes he would. “Just to be safe.”

Lydia watches Deaton’s face carefully. The way he seems to be deliberating something. “If Lydia is the next target, that would make the most sense.”

_He is coming for you._

The dark whispers of her dreams last night come back to her. He is coming for her.

\--

Derek can feel fear bloom in the bouquet of her chemo scents. It triggers a gut reaction in him that makes him struggle under the weight of his anchor. The Worm Moon is waning now, but still hangs fat and swollen just under the horizon. His claws are hot under the skin of his nail beds. He wants to flex his finger, draw them out. He likes the power it, the feel of them splitting his skin. It’s the most convenient reminder of the animal he hides. It serves to remind him that the man he wears is a shell, a mask he can easily shed.

He learned a long time ago, when he was fifteen and bloody, holding Paige in a root cellar, that he wasn’t human. And letting himself forget that, letting himself think he  _could be_  is dangerous. It gets people killed. It’d been a long-standing struggle in his life, to constantly remind himself that he was, in fact, a monster.

A fact that Lydia often makes him forget. Because she is also  _other_ , but she doesn’t have the body count he does. She is the one who heralds the deaths that weigh on him. The one who walks the rain-soaked roads in the middle of the night and trips over the bodies of her friends. He is the one who leaves them at her feet, a sacrifice to the altar of his own ignorance. His loneliness and vanity. He has to be vigilant about remembering what he is around her, especially these last few days. Especially when she’s in his house, on his couch, invading his life, filling up his loft with the sound of her breathing and the stillness of her presence.

After a prolonged silence where Derek has too much time to think about things like Lydia’s affect on him, she speaks. “Why would it target me?” she asks, her staccato heart beats in time with his. Her fear crawling up his spine like its trying to escape her.

“You disrupt the natural order of things. It’s the nature of who you are,” Deaton tells her and Derek is relieved he isn’t the one who has to tell her that she’s going to die.

“Is that why I can’t feel it, the deaths?”

“Not even banshees can predict their own death,” Derek tells her like he’s reading a textbook. Cold and methodical. He struggles to keep himself disconnected from the danger, to distance himself from her as much as possible.

“What do we do?” her voice is small when she asks, and Derek feels the resignation, the hopeless of the moment so acutely he could almost swear it was his heart that was breaking.

“What we always do,” he answers instinctively, “we fight.”

“I may have an idea about that, but I have to speak with Marin,” Deaton says as he heads for the door. “I’ll call you as soon as I know.”

Lydia hugs him before he leaves, and Derek wonders if it will make a difference. If knowing and fighting mean the same thing. But he wisely keeps his maudlin concerns to himself. Now is not the time. Not when Lydia is vibrating him with panic and anxiety.

\--

They spend the afternoon in an uneasy silence. Lydia is drawn inward, contemplating what Deaton had said. He didn’t say it was ‘what’ she was that caused an inevitable imbalance. It was 'who' she was. As if she left a swath of disorder and chaos in her wake everywhere she went. Just by being herself.

She thinks about that for awhile. She thinks about her grandmother in Eichen house. Her parents divorce. Jackson’s problems at home and then the Kanima. She thinks about Stiles and his father, and everything they’ve been through. She thinks about Scott and what his life has become. She thinks about Erica and Boyd, Ethan and Aiden, Allison’s mother and father, Derek and Peter, Allison… There has been so much death and destruction in Beacon Hills.

It seems the nature of the Nemeton is to inflict disorder. It reaches out with a darkness and weight that Lydia has only ever been able to equate to the sense of doom and animals possess for natural disasters. They can all feel it, even the humans, that Beacon Hills has become a dangerous place. That sense of foreboding that places like Florida and Louisiana collectively perceive throughout hurricane season.

Lydia wonders if she will die tonight.

The thought is terrifying. This threat isn’t the same as the others. There isn’t just someone killing people in Beacon Hills. There is something hunting  _her_  in Beacon Hills.

“Hey,” Derek says, coming back inside from the balcony. “Deaton just called.” He'd been on the phone for a good fifteen minutes. “Scott and Stiles are putting mountain ash around the Nemeton, since that where the bodies were found. The Sheriff has deputies patrolling the preserve. And he thinks we may have a name.”

“Oh?” Lydia asks.

“Archura[,](http://saeruth.tumblr.com/post/98975795554)” he says.

“Archura,” she repeats, testing the weight of it. As if the name could grant her the power to See what's hidden. “That seems familiar,” she says, trying to remember why.

“We found the name three years ago, when that nightmare spirit was in town. This one is another from Turkish folklore. A tree creature who tricks people into getting lost in the woods.” He's already headed to the bookshelf.

“The shapeshifter?” she confirms as she dredges up anything she can remember.

Derek comes back with an armful of books. And there is something so achingly familiar about this that Lydia has to turn away. She’s missed this, missed him and his loft and watching the sunset through his windows. She’s missed cups of tea and sitting barefoot on his couch. She’s missed so much in these three years. And now, look at them. Right where they left off. Almost like nothing has changed.

“What are you thinking about?” Derek asks and Lydia knows better than to lie.

“Just reminiscing,” she shrugs and takes the book he offers her.

There is something about the way the looks at her, soft and sad and just on the cusp of intimate. It makes a heat spread across her cheeks. She cracks the book open and starts leafing through the inserted translations and notes they made years ago.

Seeing Derek’s neat block-letter handwriting intermixed with her half-cursive own isn’t making this any easier. And Lydia realizes there’s nothing that’s going to make this easier. Not knowing its name, not research or mountain ash or deputies. She is going to die tonight and being here with Derek, in his loft, in his life, it’s almost enough.

The lie of it, the ‘could have been’ of it eats at her. It takes all her carefully idealized notions of duty and strength and a life half lived and makes her question all of it. Because she doesn’t regret skipping college. She doesn’t regret the people she’s saved. She has a list of their names tattooed on her heart. She doesn’t regret the life she won’t live if she dies tonight or loses her mind in a few years. The one thing that is slowly tearing her down is the time she's lost with him.

And suddenly everything is so clear.

\--

Derek keeps his eyes glued to a page he can’t really focus on, because there is a war going on inside of Lydia next to him. It starts with a bittersweet longing, nostalgia that mirrors Derek’s own. He feels it too, the routine of getting a book and settling into the couch. Her foot is touching his leg and he finds it so distracting he can’t even pretend to read.

He can feel each transition in her feelings. The wistful sadness, the frustration, the determination. He feels it press against him, spark a reflective empathetic response from him. It’s always been one of his weakness with her. She doesn’t just overwhelm him with her emotions, feeling what she feels almost always evokes a complementary response from him. If she’s scared, he’s scared. If she’s happy, he’s happy. It’s a dangerous cycle that he doesn’t know how to break. Or if he would even if he could.

Because right now she’s sitting up, the forgotten books slips from her grasp and thuds to the floor. He feels the surge of desire just before she kisses him. He is completely unprepared for it. For the eagerness that she feels and his accompanying hunger.

He wants her. He’s wanted her for a long time. And as she straddles his lap and frames his face with her hands there is nothing he can do but yield to her. Yield to the yearning that he can no longer distinguish between his and hers.

\--

Lydia rubs the stubble of his beard under her palm. She feels for that swirling impression it makes at the transition from sideburn to beard. The way it arcs and curves, a hidden pattern that she’s traced with her eyes hundreds of times. She’s fantasized about touching it for so long.

His arms come up to wrap around her back as he pulls her flush against him. And something inside her settles. A fear or doubt that maybe she was alone in this, alone in her longing fades. But when she feels his reciprocation, his heated intake of breath before he kisses her again, she allows that doubt to drift away.

And she delves into him. Loses herself to the sensations of finally kissing Derek Hale. She doesn’t have time or the ability to focus enough to memorize just the way he sounds when he’s kissing her. Or how his hands flex and knot in the fabric of her shirt. She doesn’t have time to linger on his collar bones and savor the sensation of his hair running between her fingers.

No, instead Lydia is drowning in the moment. Lips and tongues and hands on her back. She claws at him, her nails catching on the fabric of his shirt. She wants more. More of him, more of this, just more.

She leans back and traces the hem of his shirt at his waist. She tips him forward and pulls his henley off. He moans when she can’t help herself and presses a palm to his chest. She can feel the rapidfire beat of his heart hammering against the cage of his sternum.

And there is a secret language to this. To asking and taking and wanting and giving that makes Lydia dizzy. She’s knows this language, learned it well. But she lacks the articulation of wanting  _him_. So she communicates it the only way she can, she  _feels_  it.

She lets the greed well up in her, fill her to the brim. She lets him feel her fervor. She is awash with it, made of it. She splits apart at the seams from it.

This is more than sex, and Lydia knows it. This is five years in the making. This is three years of being deprived of it. This is somewhere between falling and jumping.

\--

There is a geometry to her. A shape and pattern that he knows by heart[.](http://mermaidblues.tumblr.com/post/93046330223/) The flutter of her heart, the color of her eyes, the fullness of her lips.

He's thought about her lips a lot these past three years. Their perfect pout. The way the look when she's wearing deep red lipstick. The way they shine when she wears lipgloss. The way she gets chapped lips in the winter when she says 'it's too cold to wear make up'.

He's memorized them. How they look when she smiles, when she laughs. The haunting way they pull tight across her teeth when she screams. The sad downturned corners of them when she's thinking about Allison. He's catalogued and categorized each and every expression he's ever seen her make.

And right now, he realizes he's never seen this expression.

The slackness to them, their swollen and pink, a light shade of neural lipstick smeared across her cheek. And she's breathing hard. This is a new face, a new territory for him.

He could spend a lifetime devoting himself to the study of her lips. He wonders if she knows, how beautiful she is. He wonders if he should tell her.

“You're beautiful,” he finally works himself up to admitting. And now that he has, he's glad.

Because her smile is so soft. So genuine and awed that when she says, “So are you,” he believes her.

For the first time in a long time, he can feel sincerity when he kisses someone. He can feel her passion and lust. But the traces of hope and happiness that make him feel whole.

\--

Eventually they make it to the bed, minus shirts and pants. There’s a momentary confusion about who is going to end up on top, but Lydia prevails. Now with a little distance, she has time to appreciate the way he watches her when she unclasps her bra and slips it off. The way he reaches up to cup her breasts is tentative and soft.

There is a tenderness to this that she didn’t expect. When she made the decision to kiss him, she resigned herself to a quick, desperate fuck that would ultimately leave her wanting. But in a style that is befitting Derek, he surprises her.

The same way he always has.

He takes his time. He explores her body as if she were something priceless. They rock together, unhurried, as they learn the shapes of the other.

\--

Derek relishes the feeling of her, the texture of her skin, the soft curve of her breasts, the way her heart pounds a drumbeat of urgency inside him. He can feel the heat of her through his boxer briefs. She raises up on her knees, and the distance is almost uncomfortable. The sudden lack of pressure and warmth is a painful loss. But before he has time to even protest, she’s tugged down the waistband of his underwear and pulled aside the crotch of hers.

She teases herself with the tip of his cock. Rubs it in slow circles around her clit. Her hips jerk and she gasps at one point and it takes every ounce of self control he’s ever possessed to keep still. He wants her to do it again, hit just that right spot where she see stars. He wants to make her come. He’s sure he’s never wanted anything more.

“Please,” he rasps out, unable to articulate what he’s pleading for exactly.

\--

Lydia watches his eyes close as she slides him inside herself. There is a delicacy to the moment, a tenderness that strikes her as fitting. The way his breath hitches and his fingers dig into the flesh of her thighs. This feels right.

He feels right.

In his loft, the setting sun casting oranges and reds across their field of view. It feels like she’s swimming in colors. And Derek is beautiful like this. Hushed and awed, a private moment shared at the cusp of something big. She doesn’t want to let the moment go. She wants to stay here, like this, forever.

The way he looks framed against the folds of the sheets crushed under the combined weight of their bodies. The way his eyelashes fan out against his cheeks and his lips part slightly.

But then he opens his eyes and the moment is gone. And with it, Lydia’s patience. Here is where her desperation shines through. When she leans forward, one arm holding herself away from the heat of his chest, she rocks her hips. Her movements are uncoordinated and rushed.

Their bodies make a wet slapping sound when the join. And Lydia’s hair falls across her shoulder and tickles her arm. She almost laughs, almost lets that small giggle bubble up in her throat. But then he raises up his pelvis to met her thrust and all thoughts of laughter die within her.

Instead she moans, and it feels like something is being switched on inside her. A fire, an ache, a craving she’s frantic to gratify.

Her breaths shorten as she feels the tension in her growing. Her arms ache from holding herself up, her legs burn where she strains her muscles. But it’s still not enough. Not yet. Not yet.

\--

Derek knows she’s close. The way she falls out of rhythm and pants. He wants to give her this, he wants to watch it when it happens. He wants to remember just the way she looks when she can’t contain the feeling of him anymore. He’s wild with the want of it.

When her arm slips, he reaches up to steady her. And she is barely able to sit. So he lifts her hips and bucks up to meet her. The feeling of being inside her, filling her, being surrounded by her is all-consuming. In a blur of motion, he drives into her over and over until she cries out.

\--

And like a crescendo, Lydia feels the cusp of it take root. That flare, that ache. It erupts like fire in her veins. It burns cold, and as the sensation of it spreads up and out, she shivers. Her eyes swing shut of their own volition. She couldn't keep them open if she wanted.

And she did. She wanted to see his face, watch the expression as he watched her fly apart in his hands. She wanted to see the power her pleasure has over him.

But she can't. She can't stop her eyes from closing or the moan that rolls out of her throat. Deep and guttural, like it's come from somewhere deep inside her. Somewhere primal and base.

\--

Derek is coming undone. He can feel it, the way something inside him loosens and slips. When he touches her, his fingers don’t question what he is[.](https://books.google.com/books?id=1S7T4bl7kpQC&lpg=PT110&dq=When%20I%20touch%20her%2C%20my%20fingers%20don%27t%20question%20what%20she%20is.%20My%20body%20knows%20who%20she%20is.%20The%20strange%20thing%20about%20strangers%20is%20that%20they%20are%20unknown%20and%20known.%20There%20is%20a%20pattern%20to%20her%2C%20a%20shape%20I%20understand%2C%20a%20private%20geometry%20that%20numbers%20mine.%20She%20is%20a%20maze%20where%20I%20got%20lost%20years%20ago%2C%20and%20now%20find%20the%20way%20out.%20She%20is%20the%20missing%20map.%20She%20is%20the%20place%20that%20I%20am.%20She%20is%20a%20stranger.%20She%20is%20the%20strange%20that%20I%20am%20beginning%20to%20love.&pg=PT110#v=onepage&q=When%20I%20touch%20her,%20my%20fingers%20don%27t%20question%20what%20she%20is.%20My%20body%20knows%20who%20she%20is.%20The%20strange%20thing%20about%20strangers%20is%20that%20they%20are%20unknown%20and%20known.%20There%20is%20a%20pattern%20to%20her,%20a%20shape%20I%20understand,%20a%20private%20geometry%20that%20numbers%20mine.%20She%20is%20a%20maze%20where%20I%20got%20lost%20years%20ago,%20and%20now%20find%20the%20way%20out.%20She%20is%20the%20missing%20map.%20She%20is%20the%20place%20that%20I%20am.%20She%20is%20a%20stranger.%20She%20is%20the%20strange%20that%20I%20am%20beginning%20to%20love.&f=false) She makes him forget, makes the monster inside him surrender. His body knows hers, knows the feeling and smell and touch of her.

She is a maze he was lost to years ago[.](https://books.google.com/books?id=1S7T4bl7kpQC&lpg=PT110&dq=When%20I%20touch%20her%2C%20my%20fingers%20don%27t%20question%20what%20she%20is.%20My%20body%20knows%20who%20she%20is.%20The%20strange%20thing%20about%20strangers%20is%20that%20they%20are%20unknown%20and%20known.%20There%20is%20a%20pattern%20to%20her%2C%20a%20shape%20I%20understand%2C%20a%20private%20geometry%20that%20numbers%20mine.%20She%20is%20a%20maze%20where%20I%20got%20lost%20years%20ago%2C%20and%20now%20find%20the%20way%20out.%20She%20is%20the%20missing%20map.%20She%20is%20the%20place%20that%20I%20am.%20She%20is%20a%20stranger.%20She%20is%20the%20strange%20that%20I%20am%20beginning%20to%20love.&pg=PT110#v=onepage&q=When%20I%20touch%20her,%20my%20fingers%20don%27t%20question%20what%20she%20is.%20My%20body%20knows%20who%20she%20is.%20The%20strange%20thing%20about%20strangers%20is%20that%20they%20are%20unknown%20and%20known.%20There%20is%20a%20pattern%20to%20her,%20a%20shape%20I%20understand,%20a%20private%20geometry%20that%20numbers%20mine.%20She%20is%20a%20maze%20where%20I%20got%20lost%20years%20ago,%20and%20now%20find%20the%20way%20out.%20She%20is%20the%20missing%20map.%20She%20is%20the%20place%20that%20I%20am.%20She%20is%20a%20stranger.%20She%20is%20the%20strange%20that%20I%20am%20beginning%20to%20love.&f=false) It happened so slowly he didn’t even notice. It happened over books and papers, quiet conversations and careful distance. Somewhere between then and now she has become what he’s fighting for.

He tries to wait it out, let her return from that place he can’t follow, but he can’t. He feels like his chest might collapse if he doesn’t move. So he rolls his hips up to met with the soft flesh of her inner thighs. There is a tension in his body that hums for completion. For release, for escape.

\--

She can feel it fading already, her tentative grasp on the loose tendrils of pleasure that split into fractals and branch ever-away from her. She struggles to keep it, to stay locked in the moment where everything is so beautiful and bright and sharp that she feels like she's touching the divine. She chases the sensation into a dark oblivion that eclipses the pleasure and transforms into discomfort.

But he’s so close. She can no longer count a steady beat to his thrusts. He’s making these little keening noises of ‘Ah, ah ah.’ that make her hold her tongue. She feels like she’s made of nerve endings. Everything is too much. She’s so sensitive she can’t even feel the next wave until it’s washing over her. And just like that, the almost painful friction of him pushing in and pulling out explodes into the white hot abstraction of another orgasm.

And she’s not prepared for it. It takes her by surprise. Blots out everything else. Thoughts and sensations are all dwarfed by it.

\--

Her legs clamp around him, her knees finding purchase wedged between his ribs. She cries out, her hands fisting in the sheets at her sides, tying knots around her curled toes. And the sound of her coming, the rush of cool bliss he feels from her like an echo of what he’s chasing drives him over the edge. He tips past the anticipation of it and falls effortlessly into his own satisfaction.

\----

Research and books are forgotten as they lay in a tangled knot of limbs and sheets. Lydia feels like she should say something. Explain why she needed this. She wants to tell him that it’s impossible to accept her death, but when they’re like this, it seems almost insignificant. Not that she might die tonight, because she still might, but that it would matter[.](http://mermaidblues.tumblr.com/post/93046330223/) Because her life is not burdened with regret or shame or tragedy. Her life is stitched together by moments like these. Times in her life when she is so truly happy, when she can’t even fathom what it’s like to be heartbroken or sorrowful.

“I’m scared,” she confesses and his arm tightens around her. Her ear is pressed to his chest and she takes comfort in listening to his heartbeat. “But that’s not why…” she struggles with how to say this. How to explain that it isn’t death that's brought them together.

“I know,” he tells her and places a chaste kiss to her forehead. His hands busy themselves running through her hair, spreading it up over his shoulder. “This is where we are[.](http://mermaidblues.tumblr.com/post/93046330223/)” he says simply, like it’s an explanation. And she guesses it is. It’s all the reasoning she needs, anyway.

\--

They fall asleep like that. Still holding each other, letting the sounds of the other’s heart lull them to sleep.

\----

Derek wakes up hours before sunrise. He’s anxious, but the warm body pressed against his calms him immediately.

She’s safe.

As gently as he can, he extricates himself from her. She must have woken up before him, because she’s dressed now. She’s even wearing her socks. She rolls into the space he left behind and he feels bad for leaving her alone.

But he can’t sleep anymore. So he takes the blanket from the couch and lays it over her before he settles in to read.

It takes him a while to find the right translation, but eventually he has the right book and notes.

 _Archura_ , this thing is called. A shapeshifting woodland creature. Also known as The Grey Wolf, which this text doesn’t mention, but he makes note of in the margins. He is supposed to protect trees and animals.

Looking up another book, Derek opens to the section he’d highlighted years ago about the Nemeton.

‘Toponyms related to the word Nemeton occur as far west as Galicia, Spain, as far north as Scotland, and as far east as central Turkey.’

So this thing is a woodland creature who protects trees and is sent to restore balance. ‘Said to be protected by a Divine Guardian.’ the passage reads.

“Shit,” he mumbles quietly.

This thing isn’t just here to restore balance. It was called, summoned by the Nemeton.

Derek has never admitted it out loud, but he pretty much hates that thing. If it were up to him, he would have mulched the entire stump years ago. Every shitty thing that happens in this town can be traced back to it.

He still feels like he’s missing something. There is more to this, a piece that doesn’t fit. Lydia. Why would this creature come after a banshee? Why now?

He spends a few more minutes idly flipping pages from random books until a small red one with gold-gilt pages catches his eye. It’s one of the oldest book in the collection, it’s tattered linen cover is worn at the spine from use. The delicate gold lettering of the title is all but illegible.

Buried somewhere in the middle of the small book is the story of a man with no shadow. Who lures dark souls into the forest, never to be seen again.

‘An Coimirceoir’ the druids called it. ‘The Guardian’.

This thing is hundreds of years old. It’s been written about in a dozen languages. Different forms and sightings. But they all have two thing in common. The Nemeton and restoring balance.

‘Guardians of the sacred forest are tied to the cycles of the moon.’

Derek stares at Lydia’s neat cursive translation of the Gaelic text. She’d misinterpreted ‘The Guardian’ as ‘guardians’. There is a small sketch of a Nemeton in the margins of her notes, so he guesses her focus had been on that while translating.

A quick check of the lunar calendar confirms what he already knows. The Worm Moon hasn’t fallen on March 19th since Lydia’s 17th birthday. Which means this thing has been waiting five years to cross over.

Derek is about to turn around to wake Lydia, tell her what he’s found when something hard knocks him out.

The last thing he sees before the darkness takes him is Lydia’s sock-covered feet.

\--

Derek wakes to the sound of leaves rustling.

His first thought is of Lydia. His eyes are covered, but he can smell her. He can make out the steady thump of her heart. But just like the other night, when she found Peter’s body, she is not really there. There is no trace of emotion.

They are still in the loft, at least.

“Lydia?” He asks, and tries to move. It isn’t until then that he registers the handcuffs.

“A sacrifice must be made,” another voice says. It’s deep and gnarled.

“Let her go,” Derek growls.

“Balance must be restored. The worm moon is at it’s end. Dawn approaches.”

“Fuck the moon!” Derek grunts and pulls at the cuffs, he can feel the metal yield. The second the links break he rips the blindfold away and lunges for where the voice had come from.

It’s huge. Bark for skin and branches for hair, it has a snout, fangs, and deep, black sunken eyes. And unfortunately for Derek, it’s a lot stronger than he is. It tosses him across the loft with a flick of its wrist.

His back slams against a far wall of the loft, leaving him breathless. He draws his claws and grows his fangs. He just needs to get to Lydia, if he can touch her, he’s sure he can pull her out of this trance. He has to.

Picking up the coffee table as he runs forward, he uses it as ammo. The wooden top splinters and shatters against its body, and he doesn’t move. But it was just a distraction so Derek could get around him, to where Lydia stands in a circle of mountain ash.

He hits the barrier with everything he has. But it doesn’t budge.

“Lydia!” He screams her name, like maybe it could wake her. “I am not going to let you die tonight. Do you hear me? Wake up!”

“You are not a threat,” the thing says grabbing him by the scruff of the neck and throwing him back again. This time the metal door to the loft dents from the force of his back hitting it.

“Not yet,” Derek warns as he takes another run at it. This time he uses the couch as leverage to jump over it. Again, he collides with the mountain ash barrier. It sparks blue in the dark but doesn’t move.

“Chaos must die.”

“Over my dead body!” Derek screams as he’s flung through the windows this time. The glass shatters around him in large chunks, cutting his arms and face and legs as he curls up on himself.

“She must die,” it says with a strange, inhuman voice. “Balance must be restored. The Nemeton demands it.”

“I’ll burn that useless stump to ashes before I let you touch her.” His bravado is less than convincing as he coughs up blood.

And that seems to get its attention. His soulless black eyes lock on him and he fists a jagged shard of glass, drawing blood from his palm. “Do not threaten the sacred forest,” it warns.

“What forest?” Derek taunts, “its just a hunk of wood. Nothing a little gas and a lighter couldn’t take care of.”

He moves for the first time, his feet are cloven and thick and shake the loft as he charges.

But Derek is ready for him this time. He waits until the very last second, and then raises the shard of glass and aims it directly at the soft tissue of its eye. There is a sickening sound of flesh tearing as the glass hits its mark.

It cries out and Derek takes the opportunity to lean all his weight into the attack, pushing it back, towards Lydia. Thick black liquid leaks from his face, oozing like sap down Derek’s hand. He swings wildly at Derek, trying to push him away. But he’s got momentum on his side and it only takes a few more steps before he manages to push it back far enough to break the circle of mountain ash.

He’d assumed, correctly, that it could penetrate the barrier, probably because it was a tree too… or something. He doesn’t care though. He’s already released the glass, still wedged in its eye and grabs hold of Lydia.

The second he touches her, he can feel her panic spring to the forefront of his mind. She’s there, but it’s still a distant sensation. As if he feels it from a great distance. He knows he only has a few seconds before that thing will come after him again. And this time, he’s pretty sure its going to treat him like a threat.

So he does the only thing he can think of. He kisses her.

It’s nothing like the kiss they shared earlier tonight. What happened before was uninhibited. It was soft and lingering. This kiss is desperate and painful. He runs his hands over the bare skin of her arms, cups her neck, grips her cheek. Skin on skin, lips on lips, this is the only way he knows how to save her.

\--

Lydia is in the white room. She stands alone, bathed in the harsh overhead lights. The white tiled floor stretches out before her, like an unending conveyor belt that carries her away from the stump of the Nemeton at the center of the room.

“They are not yours to keep,” a woman she didn’t notice before says. Her black skin seems to glow under the lights. Her head is shaved and Lydia struggles to understand why she’s so familiar.

“Who are you?”

“Would you let him die for you?” she asks.

Lydia can just barely make out the sound of Derek’s frantic voice screaming her name. But he’s so far away.

“Why me?” she asks.

“They are not yours to collect,” she says, this time Lydia notices a pair of scissors in her hands.

“I can hear them when I pluck their strings,” Lydia says, fingering one of the hundreds of strings of red yarn that fan out from her heart in all directions.

“Balance must be resorted,” she demands and Lydia can feel the blade slice through one of the strings of yarn she holds. The feeling of it is excruciating. She can feel each fiber fray and unravel as if it were a part of her. She screams in agony and clutches at the limp yarn that falls into her hands.

The room is only barely visible through the gaps in the yarn that extend out, like phantom appendages, from her front and back. “Please,” she begs, sobs, as she tries to protect the precious strings that are tethered to her soul.

“He has come for you,” the Nemeton says[,](http://constileslation.tumblr.com/post/110048343328/) and Lydia can only see hints of her from between the strings. Her scissors glint hungrily in the harsh lights.

“They need me,” Lydia cries, trying to gather them up, ball the yarn into a skein that she can hide away inside herself.

“You may join them,” The Nemeton says and snips another string.

Lydia loses her footing from the pain, but she doesn’t fall. The strings are holding her up, pulled tight under the weight of her.

Someone is calling her name.

“Choose!” She demands, another string falls limp behind her sheers. “Him,” she gestures to the far side of the room and Lydia can just make out Derek sputtering and coughing up blood. “Or them,” and then the strings are back.

And it’s not fair. It’s not fair to ask this of her. To ask her to choose between the souls she’s saved and Derek. They are the forgotten, the precious, the loved, the mourned. They are the ghosts of Beacon Hills. Everyone who’s ever died under the watchful eye of the Nemeton. Lydia has gathered them to her, bound them with red yarn that hum when plucked. She ties them to her heart, gathers them up and eases their pain. She brings peace to their families and takes it on herself to mourn for those who have no one left to remember them. They are hers.

But so is Derek. He’s hers in another way. He’s solid and steady and drags her kicking and screaming from the white room.

“No,” she screams, tries to tear herself away from him, tries to crawl her way back into the eerie room. But it’s too late, her heart has already decided.

Already, she can feel their strings being cut. She can feel them being ripped away from her. Each one of them who slips from her grasp burns. She is on fire.

Desperately, she reaches for one of the last strings that remain. One of the first she created. It’s knot around her heart is clumsy and the string is already fraying where The Nemeton cuts it.

Lydia Calls out, with everything she is, everything she has, and tugs on it. The string pulls tight, and it’s holder snaps into Lydia’s body. But Lydia knows this is only temporary. The string has already been cut. As soon as she releases this ghost from her body, their connection will be lost forever.

\--

Derek hauls himself off the stairs of the loft, holding his side as he spits blood. He’d only gotten to touch Lydia for a few seconds before he was torn away. The thing slammed him into the floor a few times before hurling him all the way across the loft. He has a few cracked ribs and is just raring up take another run at it when Lydia screams ‘No.’

Before he knows what’s happening, there is a blinding flash of white light (where he might see a room filled with red strings), and he finds himself in the preserve, at the foot of the Nemeton. Lydia and the Archura have also been transported. The trail of mountain ash around the base of the stump is blown away.

Derek tries to regain his equilibrium after the abrupt change in location. But in a matter of seconds, everything has changed. The smells of the city are gone, replaced by the deep, rich scent of damp earth. The sounds of cars and people are now the chirps of crickets and the distant babble of flowing water.

He’s still trying to figure out what the hell happened when Lydia’s chemo scents slam into him so hard, he stumbles back, reaching out to steady himself against the stump. She is in so much pain, he can’t process it.

“Lydia?” he calls, trying to get to his feet, but between his injuries and her pain, he can barely stand.

“Not Lydia,” she blinks and her eyes glow white.

“Who are you? What did you do to her?”

“Der,” she says and tilts her head. And just like that, something shatters inside him. “It’s me.”

And Derek doesn’t have to ask who. They way she holds her head, the way she says his name, the way she smells… there’s only one person it could be. “Laura?”

“I don’t have long,” she warns, her eyes sliding to the side, as if she’s listening to something he can’t hear. Beside her, Archura turns away from them.

“The choice has been made. Balance is restored. The sun rises,” he says and transforms into a Grey Wolf and disappears into the shrinking night.

“Is she safe?” Derek asks before Laura can speak again.

“She will be,” Laura replies. “She rescued me. She found me wandering and took me in.”

“That’s why it came for her, because she was collecting souls.”

“She loves you, she saved me for your sake.”

“Why is she in so much pain?” Derek asks and tries to breath around the overwhelming pressure of it.

“It hurts to lose something so dear,” Laura answers and Derek has no idea what that means.

“How many did she lose?”

Her eyes go wide and distant and she whispers a broken, “All of them. Everyone who’s ever died in Beacon Hills. Mom, Dad, Uncle Peter. Our whole family. Our pack, your pack. Her friends, her friend’s parents… she saved all of us. Showed us compassion and gave us peace.”

“How are you here, if she lost all of them?”

“She pulled me to her. Drew me into herself and shielded me. But our connection has been severed. She’s sacrificing part of herself to give you this.”

Derek breaks. Knowing what it’s costing Lydia to give him this, these few stolen moments with his sister is too much.

“Laura,” he chokes. He can feel tears on his cheek.

“It wasn’t your fault,” she cuts him off. “I don’t hate you. I don’t blame you. I love you. I’m proud of you. Mom and Dad are proud of you. Peter is better now. He’s with the rest of us. We love you so much,” Lydia is crying and Derek has to stop himself from hugging her. He knows if he touches her now, he’ll lose Laura forever. “It’s time to move on,” she says.

“I wish we had more time,” he pleads. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I wasn’t here for you. I’m sorry about the fire, about Kate. It was my fault.” And confessing that to his sister is the hardest thing he’s ever done. “I didn’t know. I’m sorry,” he’s crying like a child now. Shaking and sobbing and torn between asking Laura to stay and telling her to leave.

What is this costing Lydia, to give him this?

“She’s fading,” Laura warns. “I don’t know how to bring her back!” her voice shakes with a fear Derek doesn’t need to smell to feel.

“Take my hand,” he tells Laura, holding it out. “I can bring her back.”

She reaches up, but hesitates. “Don’t fuck this up, baby bro. Or I swear to God, I’ll poltergeists your ass from here to eternity.”

He can’t help it, he laughs. It’s just so strange, hearing his sister so clearly in Lydia’s voice. “Promise,” he agrees and she smiles gently before she places her hand in his.

\--

Lydia clenches up the bulk of her essence into as small an area as she can manage, outside herself. But she can feel herself slipping away, slowly leaking off into the ether.

Unable to feel her body, or sense the souls around her, Lydia only has a few moments before she will spread out. No boundary to keep her in. No tether to bind her to her the physical world. She is going to fade away.

She knows Laura is with Derek now, and that is enough. Because it was all she could do. She’d found Laura’s soul early on, when she was still looking for Allison. But her soul was so big and so full that Lydia had always struggled with how to accommodate her without expelling herself.

But when she could feel souls being cut off, she’d reached out and pulled her in. It was instinctual, to grab hold and swap herself out. This was the reason she’d been gathering souls. A chance for resolution, to say goodbye to loved ones. So she knew, if there was only one chance for it, it was worth the risk of losing parts of herself.

Just as she loses the tentative hold she has on herself, when the rolling mist of her Soul starts to creep and evaporate something tugs her back.

A feeling of swelling inside her body is innate. She stretches up and out and rushes into the vacant spaces left behind as Laura leaves her. But unlike with Clarke, where she’d chased him out, Lydia struggles to hold herself back, to let Laura stay just a second longer.

\--

“I’ve got you,” Derek whispers as he pulls Lydia to him.

He knows Laura is gone now. He could feel her recede the second he touched Lydia’s hand. When her knees gave out, he was there to catch her.

“No,” she cries, reaching out with her hands for what he’s sure she will never be able to grasp.

“It’s okay. It’s over now. You’re safe,” he tries to comfort her, running his hands through her hair and over her face as gently as he can.

“I lost them,” and the way she breaks at the admission physically hurts him. He can feel her pain, her sorrow, her rage. “They’re gone.”

“I know,” he says. He’s not sure what else there is to say. “Thank you, for letting me talk to Laura.”

“I’m sorry, I tried to save her,” Lydia confesses. And he’s not sure if she’s apologizing for keeping his sister’s soul, or for not keeping it long enough. “I just wanted to give her some closure.”

“I know,” he says again. Over and over. As many times as she needs to hear it.

\--

That’s the way Scott and the others find them, Derek holding Lydia while she sobs. His back aches, even though he can already feel himself healing.

Melissa takes Lydia from him, wraps her in The Sheriff’s jacket and leads her out of the woods. Stiles and Chris go with her, and from the fragments of conversation he hears, he gets the impression that they both knew what Lydia was doing.

It’s not surprising, really. Of course Lydia would have looked for Allison. Of course she would have gone to Chris, let Allison say goodbye. Stiles probably needed it more than anyone, a chance to hear he was forgiven. Derek can only imagine the weight that would have lifted from him, but just from the way he feels after speaking to Laura for a minute, he understands the magnitude of something like that.

Deaton and The Sheriff and Scott stay with him. Scott helps him up and they ask a million questions about what happened and how they got here. Derek explains as best he can, filling in gaps in the timeline as they walk back to the road.

The sun in rising now, a reminder of what was lost to the night.

\--

His place is a mess. He’d almost forgotten, after spending six hours at the precinct going through it again and again until everyone was satisfied that this was really over. But this isn’t the first time Derek’s had to rebuild the loft after a fight. He’s an expert at it now. His contractor is number six on his favorites list.

Right now, though, he’s tired and sore and just wants to sleep for a week.

But three feet from his bed, he has to stop. The smell of Lydia is so overwhelming, he decides to sleep on the couch instead. He has to right it first, replace the cushions. But once he does, he realizes it smells like her too. In fact, there’s no part of his home that isn’t touched by her scent.

With every breath, he can feel different parts of the night. Her fear, her struggle, her happiness, her lust. Everywhere he looks there’s another reminder of her. And Derek is beginning to realize that his apartment, ransacked and broken, is a pretty good metaphor for his life. Because just like his apartment, there is no part of his life that Lydia has left untouched.

\--

Lydia mourns for them, for the Dead she lost. She mourns for Stiles and Chris, for Derek and her mother. She feels empty without them. No strings to tie her to the other side, they've all gone back to the hushed, whispers they used to be. She tries to Call them to her as Chris drives her to the hospital. Melissa had insisted on it. But all she can sense is a distant impression of fear. 

She touches her chest, where she'd seen the yarn exit her body in the white room. She can still feel the phantom tugs of them as they were cut. 

"They're not gone," Stiles says next to her in the back seat. He takes her hand and Lydia allows herself to cry.

"I can't feel them anymore."

"They're still there, you just can't keep them," Chris says over his shoulder, his eyes still on the road. She managed to fill them in on the walk out of the woods what The Guardian took from her. Chris and Stiles, of course, already knew about her collection of souls. They had both spoken to Allison through her. 

"You have to let them go," Stiles says as he strokes her hair. "You can't hold on to them."

Lydia knows they're right. In fact, since the moment she heard the fable about the Grey Wolf who restored balance, she might have known it would come for her. She knew she should let them go, sever the connections she created when her business was done. But she'd never been able to. The thought of casting them back into the darkness, alone and scared paralyzed her. 

'It's the nature of who you are' Deaton had said. And he'd been right. It wasn't that she was a banshee that made her a target. It was because she wouldn't let them go. She took their pain into herself, felt their anguish and distress. She felt their longings and fear and she couldn't turn her back on them. She couldn't send them back, abandon them to the veil. 

But she also knows now that if she tries to collect them again, the Nemeton will come for her. She will have to learn to cut the bonds she forms. She knows it will hurt, every time she reaches out now, pours energy into a link, she will also suffer the torment and sorrow of separation. 

Just thinking about it makes her ache. 

She wishes Derek were here. She needs to tell him why she kept Laura, why she didn't tell him about the souls. She needs to know he's okay, if he could still look at her the way he did tonight. But for now, she settles for crying into Stiles' hoodie and letting Melissa give her a physical. There would be time for them later. 

\----

“Hey,” Lydia whispers as she crawls into bed.

Derek cracks an eye and rolls towards her. “Hey,” he grunts. “Ah!” He says as he recoils away from her ice-cold feet. “You’re cold.”

“And you’re so warm,” she teases and sticks her ice cube toes under his leg.

“You’re a terrible person,” he grunts and pulls her flush against him. The covers of their bed are tangled between them.

It’s been a month since The Guardian took Lydia’s souls. A month where they’ve slowly learned how to be a couple.

No one seems surprised. Chris just shakes his hand and mumbles “Finally,” under his breath.

Stiles threatens to kill him if he hurts her. Scott just claps his shoulder and says he’s happy for them. Kira takes him aside when she's in town and hugs him so fiercely he doesn't know what to do. She tells him that he deserves this, that they're good together. And her vehemence that they should be happy is so genuine, he can't really do anything but agree with her.

Lydia is strangely silent about the whole thing.

He knows they have a few things to work out, like learning to trust each other. Derek hadn’t told her about the nightmares three years ago, and Lydia hadn’t told him about collecting souls. But he thinks they might be okay. He knows she worries about losing her mind. He always feels like she’s watching the clock, waiting for her genetic insanity to rip her away. Derek doesn’t know how he feels about that, if he believes she’s destined to go crazy.

But he tells her that he’s willing to risk it, if she is.

She spends the night a lot. Her cat has its own bed next to the couch that she conveniently ignores and claims an unused pillow next to Derek’s head.

It’s not a perfect life. But he knows how close he came to never having it, to losing her, and it’s perfect to him. Just being around her, getting to wake up next to her, kiss her goodnight, complain about her cat, there's no other life he'd rather have. Because for the first time in years, even in the middle of the night with icicle-feet stealing his body heat, he’s happy.

He likes to think Laura would be proud of him for this too. For finally opening up and letting someone in.

And if she just happens to boss him around and redecorates his loft and has an opinion on absolutely everything, then so much the better. After all, he’s no stranger to strong women.

**Author's Note:**

> You may notice that throughout this fic, some of the punctuations are links. These are where inspiration came from for certain parts. If you would like to see a collection of the tumblr posts that helped inspired and guide this fic, you can see them all [here](http://rosweldrmr.tumblr.com/tagged/balance-insp). However, the main inspiration for this fic came directly from Ivy. Both when she asked for a [Deputy!Derek Dydia fic](http://ivorygraves.tumblr.com/post/92579087980) and when she expressed the desire to see a fic where [Lydia has more control over her powers](http://rosweldrmr.tumblr.com/post/114268609757) (which she actually asked for while I was writing this).
> 
> I hope this lived up to your expectations. <3


End file.
